Queer Theory

Queer theory emerged during the 1990s, influenced by queer social activist aims to expose and to challenge heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Its interdisciplinary development in academe has been heavily influenced by poststructural feminism and other post- foundational, multiperspective theoretical discourses. These discourses have had currency across a spectrum of academic disciplines and areas of study including anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Queer theory continues to develop and build on these discourses. It is a multifaceted theoretical and creative space for contestation and discovery. Queer theory contests, interrogates, and disrupts systemic and structural relationships of power that are historically caught up in heteronormative attitudes, values, and practices, as well as heteronormative ideological, linguistic, existential, and strategic conventions and constructs. These power relationships have variously defiled or dismissed sexes, sexualities, and genders not sanctioned by heteronormativity. Heteronormativity presumes and values heterosexuality (or the opposite-sex attraction between a biological XY male and a biological XX female) as the norm against which other sexualities have historically been labeled deviant. This entry engages queer theory in its opposition to heteronormativity by discussing the meaning of queer, the emergence of queer theory since the early 1990s, and the relationship between queer theory and research.

The Meaning of Queer

Historically, queer has been a derogatory term used to diminish sexual-minority persons and assault their integrity and dignity. Including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, intersex, and two-spirited individuals, queer represents a diverse and at best loosely configured spectral community across sex, sexual, and gender differences. Queers have different histories, identities, identifications, needs, and desires that set them apart not only from heterosexuals, but also from one another. The interwoven historical, social, and cultural thread connecting queers across differences is marginalization. For some, the terms trans-identified, intersex, and two-spirited may be new. Trans-identified describes individuals whose gender identity does not conform to the simplicity of the male-female, two-gender model. Intersex depicts individuals who may possess both male and female biological sex characteristics. Two-spirited is an Aboriginal term used to refer to persons whose bodies are believed to have both a masculine and a feminine spirit.

From Queer Theory to Queer Research

Since they emerged only during the 1990s, queer theory and queer studies lack a significant history of research traditions. Qualitative research methods that focus on investigating everyday experience and making meaning have proven advantageous to queer research bent on social and cultural change at the grassroots level. Queer research is still coming to terms with ethical, strategic, and methodological aspects of research on sexual minorities and their everyday experiences in culture and society. Thus researchers who engage in queer research are mediating research terrain that is in genesis as they take up matters of research design, methods, ethics, and research politics. During the 1990s, much queer research focused on textual and linguistic analyses. In this period, queer research largely failed to engage in dispositional, relational, and contextual analyses of the ways medical, educational, and other institutions and their heteronormative practices affect sexual minorities. There is still an urgent need to conduct ...